The Trail to Buddha's Mirror (13 page)

“And?” Xao asked.

“There was a message.”

“Good.”

’ ‘The doll is in the hallway,’” the driver recited.

Xao inhaled the smoke, which tasted better than it had all day. He was suddenly ravenously hungry.

“Tell her to wait.”

“Yes, Comrade Secretary.”

The driver saluted and left the room.

Xao took a pair of chopsticks from the top desk drawer and wiped them on the hem of his shin.

“‘The doll is in the hallway,’” he repeated to himself. “Good.” The food was delicious.

PART TWO
The Unpredictable Ghost

6

Kipling had it wrong with that bit about East and West never meeting. East and West meet in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong usually gets called an island, which is true as far as it goes. The
island
of Hong Kong meets the basic requirement, being surrounded by water, but the
colony
of Hong Kong includes more than 230 islands. However, the largest chunk of the colony sits on the mainland, which is to say it isn’t surrounded by water at all. It’s surrounded by China.

The colony of Hong Kong is more correctly called the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which is a way of letting you know it’s one of those pieces of real estate the British stole when they were still capable of doing that kind of thing. They grabbed Hong Kong Island itself back in 1841 as compensation for a few warehouses of their opium that the Chinese burned. Seems that the Chinese government had some objections to the British trying to turn Chinese citizens into junkies, and interfered with the sacred principles of free trade by confiscating the dope. So Queen Victoria lent the Royal Navy to her drug dealers and showed the cheeky mandarins that British merchants would peddle dope to anyone they damn well pleased, thank you very much. The navy shelled a few forts, killed a few chinks, and took an empty little island called Hong Kong as reimbursement for the out-of-pocket expenses. The Queen was pissed, though, because she thought she should have gotten a lot more for her money than one stinking rock with no potential customers on it, and fired the guy who inked the contract. That’s the thing about pushers—they’re never satisfied.

Sure enough, the British spent the rest of the century asserting the sacred right-to-deal, teaching the yellow heathen a lesson, and collecting more land as a tutorial fee, and that’s how the Crown Colony of Hong Kong came to occupy some 366 square miles, and the Chinese came to wish that Kipling had been right.

The West had the nifty high-tech weaponry, but the East had something better: population. Lots of it. You can plant any flag you want, but if it waves over a place that has a few thousand Brits and five million Chinese, you don’t need a rocket scientist to figure out that the place is more Chinese than British. And it took the Chinese about five minutes back in old ’41 to decide that there was some serious money to be made by getting in the middle between the West and the East, and that Hong Kong was just the place to do it. Hong Kong became the back door to China, a place from which to sneak stuff in and sneak stuff out, and any time you have a lot of sneaking going on, you have a lot of money going with it. Nothing sweet moved in either direction without Hong Kong getting a taste, and the place became a paradise for people with an aptitude for your basic capitalism with the gloves off.

The Chinese moved there in droves. They walked, they took boats, they swam. They still do. No one really knows the population of Hong Kong, especially since 1949, when Mao took over and made things hot for people with an aptitude for your basic capitalism with the gloves off, and inspired several hundred thousand of them to go for a moonlight swim in the South China Sea.

So Hong Kong is crowded. Now, arithmetic will tell you that five million or so people in 366 square miles isn’t that bad, but long division doesn’t tell you that most of those 366 square miles go up and down. Most of Hong Kong is made up of steep hills, many of them uninhabitable, so the population is crammed into relatively small segments of the colony. When you get a lot of people in a small area where lots of money changes hands, what you also get is great extremes of wealth and poverty, because the fingers on some of those hands are pretty sticky.

The rich tend to live on the tops of the hills, of course, especially on “the Peak,” more properly called Victoria Peak, the oh-so-exclusive neighborhood founded by the early Western drug lords but later dominated by Chinese financiers. Your status on the Peak is determined by your altitude; the goal is to literally look down on your neighbor. In many ways, the Peak is a little piece of England. It has the cultural airs of the English aristocracy fortunately modified by Chinese love of life. The Peak’s inhabitants send their children off to Oxford or Cambridge for college, take four-o’clock tea, play croquet, and complain that the servants get cheekier every year. At the same time, they drive pink Rolls-Royces, the tea tends to be jasmine, they light incense to Buddhist saints to ensure good luck in gambling, and the servants are a part of a hugely extended family.

The poor have hugely extended families, too, and most of them would be thrilled to get a job pouring tea in a mansion on the Peak. That would mean they could get enough to eat and maybe a place to sleep where they could stretch their legs out. A lot of the poor live on the mainland section called Kowloon, where there’s a person for every nine square feet and where the real-estate moguls plowed some of the hills into the ocean and put up huge blocks of high-rise tenements.

Kowloon has a lot of people and a lot of everything else, too, especially neon. The neon proclaims the sale of cameras, watches, radios, suits, dresses, food, booze, and naked ladies dancing for your pleasure. The main street is called Nathan Road—the “Golden Mile”—and walking down Nathan Road at night is like having an acid flashback, a trip through a tunnel of bright, flashing lights with surround sound.

Walking up Nathan Road, on the other hand, is like walking from Europe into Asia, and in the old days that was at least symbolically the case, because the Orient Express began down near the Star Ferry Pier at the bottom of Nathan Road. If you walk north up the road from there, you’re pointed for China proper: the People’s Republic of China, the PRC, the Middle Kingdom. Where East and West don’t meet. So you don’t want to walk too far up the Nathan Road. You get too far up the Nathan Road and you’re not necessarily coming back.

Unless you’re Chinese, that is, which makes all kinds of sense when you think about it. As crowded as Hong Kong is, as rough and tumble in its unbridled, unchecked, unregulated commercial competition, the Chinese keep going there. Sometimes the gatekeepers at the PRC border simply open the gates, and the flood is unstoppable. Other times those agrarian reformers on the mainland lock their people in, so the people sneak down the Pearl River from Canton, or crawl under the fence up by the New Territories, or wade across the Shumchun River, or paddle rafts across Deep Bay.

They come for a lot of reasons: opportunity, freedom, refuge, asylum. But the reason that most of them come can be summed up in one simple, uncomplicated word.

Rice.

Neal Carey didn’t crawl under a fence or wade a river or paddle a raft. He came in a Boeing 747 wide-body on which the Singaporean stewardess handed him steaming hot towels to wipe his face and wake him up. He came on the overnight flight from San Francisco. Mark Chin and his associates had driven him to the airport, and Chin had given him instructions on what to do when he landed at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport.

“My cousin Ben will be there to meet you, right outside of immigration,” Chin had told him.

“How will I know him?” Neal asked.

Chin had smiled broadly. “You’ll know him.”

It didn’t take long for the efficient and unsmiling immigration officials to handle the incoming crowd. Neal told them that he was there as a tourist, and they asked him how much money he had brought with him. His answer matched the number he had put down on the immigration form, and they let him right in. He didn’t tell them he was going to put the Bank’s gold card away for the duration, though, lest he be tracked down via the paper trail.

He didn’t have any trouble recognizing Ben Chin. He had the same thick chest, the same block-of-granite face, and the same short black hair. He sported a silk lavender shirt, white denims, and black tassled loafers. His wraparound reflective sunglasses were pushed up on his head.

Ben Chin didn’t have any trouble recognizing Neal, either.

“Mark said to hide you out and help you find some babe, right?” he asked as he grabbed Neal by the shoulder.

“Close enough.”

“So maybe I should get you out of a crowded airport,” Chin said. “Where’s your luggage?”

Neal hefted his shoulder bag. “You’re looking at it.”

Chin led him through the terminal and out into the parking lot.

“Kai Tak Airport is a very sad place, you know. According to legend, this is where the Boy Emperor, the last ruler of the Sung Dynasty, jumped off a cliff into the ocean and drowned.”

“Why did he do that?”

“He lost a war with the Mongols or something, I don’t know. Anyway, he didn’t want to be captured.”

“I don’t see a cliff or an ocean.”

“Bulldozers. We’d rather have an airport than a suicide launch pad.”

Chin unlocked the trunk of a ’72 Pinto and threw Neal’s bag in. Then he opened the left-side passenger door for Neal. He gestured for Neal to get in and then walked around to the right side of the car and squeezed himself behind the steering wheel. As they pulled out of the lot, he asked, “Aren’t you going to tell me how good my English is?”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“I did a year at UCLA.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, but I flunked out.” He patted his belly. “I clean-jerked a few too many brews, you know what I mean?”

“I’ve had those nights.”

“Did you go Greek?”

“Hmm?”

“Which frat?” Ben asked.

“I lived at home.”

“Oh,” said Ben.

He sounded so disappointed that Neal added, “In an apartment. By myself.”

“Cool.”

Help me, baby Jesus, Neal pleaded. Less than a week ago I was happily burrowed in my little hill, now I’m trapped in a ’72 deathmobile in Hong Kong with a failed frat rat. Life is a strange and wonderful carnival of experiential delights.

“So what do you do now?” Neal asked, trying to avoid a discussion of those good old college days of keggers, mixers, and coeds.

“I’m a security guard at the Banyan Tree Hotel.”

Please, baby Jesus, come down now. I’m off the midway and headed for the sideshow tents.

“It’s the family trade. Besides, it gives me access to a gym. And a place where I can conduct a couple of sidelines, if you know what I mean.”

Yeah, I think I know what you mean.

“The security work?” Ben continued. “I have it dicked. The place was a mess when I took the job. Thieves … beggars … little kids swiping handbags. The tourists were really put off. And vandalism that you wouldn’t believe. I came in and brought some of my boys with me. We cleaned it up, you know what I mean?” He showed Neal his enormous fist. “Now the word is out. We don’t have to work much, and the owners are happy to pay us, feed us, let us use the gym—an empty room now and then when the need comes up, if you know what I mean.”

Yeah, I know what you mean. You organize the thieves, the beggars, and the pickpockets. You commit the vandalism. Then you make it stop. It works the same way in Chinatown in New York, or in Little Italy. People pay you to protect them against yourself. It works the same way on Wall Street, on Capitol Hill. On the street it’s called “protection,” in the halls of power they call it “lunch.”

“I think I know what you mean, Ben.”

“I think you do, too.”

Ben Chin eased his way skillfully into the flow of slow-moving early-morning traffic. He stayed in the mainstream moving down Chatham Road for about twenty minutes, then manuevered into a turn lane and onto Tung Tau Tsuen Street.

Chin pointed out the window to a patch of decrepit, filthy, high-rise tenements about the size of two football fields.

“You don’t ever want to go in there, Neal.”

“No?”

“No. That’s the Walled City. You go in there, you don’t come back out. It’s like a maze.”

Neal said, “I don’t see any walls.”

“Torn down. It was a Sung fort. Even the British didn’t want it when they took over in Kowloon. You’re looking at one of the worst slums in the world. No government, no law. It’s the end of the road.”

Ben sped up again and turned back onto Chatham Road.

“Speaking of the end of the road,” Neal said, “where are we going?”

“To the hotel. We got you a nice room.”

Any time now, baby Jesus.

“Ben, didn’t your cousin explain to you that some people might be looking for me?”

“sure.”

“So, a hotel?” Neal asked. No wonder you flunked out.

“Not a hotel, Neal.
My
hotel. You don’t sign the register, and you have a room we can keep an eye on. Nobody will get to you.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“My boys at the hotel.”

“The other guards that you supervise.”

Ben Chin chuckled. “Sure. We pride ourselves on keeping our guests safe and secure.”

Chin took a left off Chatham onto Austin Road.

“Hey, Ben?”

“Yeah, Neal?”

“Let’s cut the happy-Buddha, Hop Sing routine, and get down to it. You’re mobbed up, right?”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘mobbed up.’”

The idea sure didn’t make him mad, though. He was grinning with glee.

“You’re a junior executive with one of the Triads. In the management training program, so to speak.”

“Oooohh, ‘Triad’ … the man thinks he knows the lingo.”

Yeah, the man thinks he does. You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and stupid to do my kind of work in any major city in America and not know about the crime syndicates that controlled so much of daily life in every Chinatown. Neal knew that the Triads’ high-ticket item was heroin, but the protection racket provided a big slice of the daily bread, and the Triad bosses used this extortion as a training ground for its thugs and up-and-comers. The Triads had spread their fingers over the Asian communities worldwide, but their home offices were in Hong Kong.